Decisions in time

It takes more time to decide what house to buy than it does to choose what to have for dinner. (Well, for some of us anyway.) Why is this? What strategies do we use to make decisions, and why do some decisions take longer than others? I study how the brain gathers evidence over time and decides when it has enough evidence to act.

Specifically, I look at how time changes the strategies that we use. For instance, how do we make decisions when the world around us is changing? What if we anticipate that the world will change in a certain way? And what if some outcomes are more costly than others? I want to understand how people make these decisions and what is happening in the brain when they do.

Activity in a brain area involved in eye movements briefly falls after new evidence arrives, then rebounds.
This shows how the brain responds to new incoming information of different strengths. New information arrives at time zero, marked by the dotted line. About a tenth of a second later, activity in a brain area involved in eye movements briefly dips, then rebounds. When the new information is strong and clear, shown in bright red, we get the strongest dip; when it is weaker, indicated by darker shades of red, we get a smaller dip. The grey curve shows the comparison when there is no new evidence. Computer models to explain this dip suggest that this brief pause prevents premature action, giving the new information time to influence the decision. Shinn and colleagues (2022), Figure 3d.

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